Noam Chomsky -
ĎAssad Is Facing Assassination No Matter What Happensí

My first
question is supposed to be related to Magnitsky
Act and uneasiness between Russia and the US.
What do you think about it? Is there going to be
something big related to this Act?

I think
the right reaction on the part of Russia would
be to pass a bill which would require the
Russian Foreign Office to maintain a public list
of human rights abusers in the US and freeze
their assets. They could begin with President
Obama who is the major human rights violator. He
is directing a global assassination campaign
which is a major atrocity. I mean if Russia were
doing anything like that Ė people would be
talking about having a nuclear war. And they
need to go on from there. So, for example the US
is strongly supporting, and in fact
participating in terrible human rights abuses,
in Gaza just a couple of weeks ago again, and go
around the world. The US is providing huge
amounts of armaments to Saudi Arabia which is
one of the worst human rights abusers in the
world and you can go on from there. So, that
would be the right reaction but of course it is
not going to do it.

But do you
think that generally thatís going to really
bring some uneasiness from now on in relation to
Russia-US relations? Or is it just going to be a
piece of paper?

Well, it
depends on how the matter is handled. If it is
just regarded as a symbolic gesture with no
consequences, then itíll just be a notion. On
the other hand, if it influences policy, it
could be more than that. And the idea that the
US wouldnít do something like that, given its
shocking human rights record, right at the
moment it takes a lot of goal actually. Of
course thatís not understood in the US, the
media doesnít talk about it. If I refer to
President Obama as one of the leading human
rights violators in the world, although it is
true, if I said that in an interview with New
York Times, they wouldnít know what Iím talking
about.

Could you
tell us something about what do you think about
Obamaís reelection? What does it mean to Russia,
especially in relations to the US missile
defense system which is about to be assembled in
Europe, or at least we think it is going to be
assembled?

First of
all, it is worth bearing in mind that on all
sides, it is understood by strategic analysts
and presumably by political leaders, that
missile defense system is a first strike weapon.
Missile defense systems, even if they work, and
thatís a question, but to the extent that they
work they are not going to be able to stop the
first strike. Conceivably, they could prevent a
retaliatory strike which means that they are
effectively a first strike weapon. And of course
Russia knows this and American planners know
this and so on.

So,
placing a missile system near Russiaís borders,
which is what is planned, is a highly
provocative act. If Russia tries to do that, in
Canada letís say, we just go to war. It wouldnít
be even remotely tolerated. Obama has made some
slight adjustments in the plans for missile
systems under Bush, but they still leave the
system in a form which Russian military and
Russian strategic analysts have to interpret as
highly threatening, just as the US would if
Russia was doing anything similar. Now, during a
couple of months ago youíll recall that
off-camera Obama made some comments hinting that
maybe heíd back off on it after the election.
That became a big issue here and of course that
was recalled. But whether heíll do anything like
that, I doubt very much.

What do
you think about Russia-US relations? How are
they going to develop?

Well,
weíve already talked a little bit on that.
Russiaís got plenty of internal problems and how
it is going to handle these is not at all clear.
The direct conflicts between Russia and the US
may not be as sharp as potentially between the
US and China. In the case of China and the US,
they have a huge trading relation. In fact,
China holds a substantial part of US debt, that
is little more than Japan. And of course the US
and Europe are the main consumers of Chinese
goods. In the case of Russia thatís much less.
So, it is only energy exports. So, it is quite a
different relationship.

Syria,
NATO and Turkey

And the
next question is related to Syria. NATO approved
the deployment of Patriot missile interceptors
to defend the Turkish border with Syria. What do
you think, what is going to happen next?

I donít
think anybody knows. Syria is moving towards
kind of suicide and there doesnít seem to be any
easy way out. This morning got even worse, as
you may have seen there was a battle yesterday
between the Kurdish and rebel forces. That adds
a new complexity to the situation which of
course very much affects Turkey. Turkey is quite
worried naturally about the rise of the Kurdish
autonomy region in Syria and how it might affect
the huge Kurdish problem within Turkey. But
inside Syria it just looks like a growing horror
story with no real feasible solution insight.
There are various proposals, there is another
one coming along today in discussions, I believe
in Dublin, with Al-Akhdar Ibrahimi and
representatives of Russia and the US. But it is
going to be extremely difficult to find a way
out of this without just destruction of the
country.

Assad
himself is facing assassination no matter what
happens, I mean if he agrees to leave the
country Ė he would probably be killed by his
Alawite associates because he is abandoning them
to whatever fate would happen. If he doesnít
leave the country sooner or later it would be
wiped out. There have been proposals, just a
couple of days ago there was a proposal by one
serious specialist Nicholas Noe that there will
be temporary some kind of partition in which a
region around Damascus is left under Assadís
control and the rest of the country is left
under rebel control and see if they can work out
some modus vivendi in which there could be a
reduction of violence and maybe a negotiated
settlement. But thatís a long shot and I havenít
really heard any other good proposal.

And
another problem that is arising is the chemical
weapons problem. Syria has already crossed what
Obama called his red line. On chemical weapons
the US has backed off and moved the red line a
little backwards but sooner or later thatís
going to be a huge problem. And nobody hasnít
answered to it. You canít bomb them!

Serbia and
Hague tribunal

Iím from
Serbia, I was born in Belgrade and the situation
in Syria really resembles to what we had in
ex-Yugoslavia. First, the civic unrest and then
it became really like a big war, and then we had
bombing on Kosovo. So, thatís why Iím asking,
because this is really very much alike.

We could
talk about Kosovo, but I think thatís a
different situation. I think thatís very much
misrepresented in the West.

Could you
talk a little bit about the Hague Tribunal? Two
Croatian generals convicted of killing the
ethnic Serbs in the 90íes have been quitted in
Hague. And then, ten days later Ramush
Haradinaj, one of the ex-KLA leaders, was also
acquitted of all charges. How do you comment
this?

It is very
hard to take the Hague Tribunal seriously from
the beginning. If we go back to Kosovo again,
there was an international tribunal and Louise
Arbour who was then in charge of it was
approached by Western lawyers in fact with a
proposal to investigate NATO bombing. And she
said that NATO would not be a subject to
investigation by the tribunal. That tells us
right of it, it is not the serious tribunal. And
everything thatís followed from that is pretty
predictable. I mean there were efforts to do
something, like her successor did talk about
investigating KLA atrocities, the charges of
organ removal and so on, but that was quickly
quashed.

Exactly!
The problem is that we canít really consider the
Hague Tribunal as the serious one. But still
many Serbian leaders got life detention so it
seems like there is really no justice or this is
really notÖ

You know,
this goes far back. I mean probably of all the
tribunals I think the most serious and reputable
one was the Nuremberg Tribunal, you know, the
first modern tribunal. But if you look at it, it
was deeply flawed, and that was understood by
the prosecutors. So, the principles of the
Nuremberg Tribunal, what they came down to is Ė
if you committed a crime and we didnít commit
the same crime, then it is a crime.

So, for
example saturation bombing of urban civilian
concentrations was not considered a crime at
Nuremberg, because their allies did it more than
the Germans did. German admiral submarine
commander DŲnitz in his defense at Nuremberg he
brought an American admiral Nimitz and the
representative of the British Admiralty who
testified that Britain and the US carried out
the same crimes that he was accused of. And that
was considered by the Tribunal sufficient to
absolve him of those charges. So, altogether the
tribunal, morally speaking, it was very deeply
flawed for these reasons. But still, I think
that was the most serious of the tribunals that
have been established.

I
understand your thesis and your point of view,
but still, since Iím from Serbia it is really
difficult to comprehend that we as a nation, as
a state, are going to have a kind of guilt from
now on till who knows when. But it seems like it
is going to happen and the history is already
written somewhere and we canít really change it,
although I canít say that we are really guilty
as much as the international community says we
are.

Russia and
EU

Your
expectations for the next year related to the
world economic or financial crisis in the EU?
And generally, what do you think is going to
happen in international relations, Russia-US
relations, China-US relations?

Too many
questions to try to answer. A lot of things are
uncertain. Letís begin with the financial
crisis. The financial crisis is created by what
has been called a ďdoom loopĒ by one of the
directors of the British bank in charge of
banking stability. It is a ďdoom loopĒ because
there is a system in the US and Britain and to
some extent elsewhere in which the big
investment firms are essentially encouraged to
undertake risky transactions in which they can
make a lot of profit because they are risky. And
they will sooner or later collapse because of
the risk and at that point the tax payer comes
in and bails them out. Thatís a ďdoom loopĒ.

There is a
government insurance policy for the big banks.
The name for it in the US is too big to fail, so
we got to bail them out when they get into
trouble. It is essentially a government
insurance policy. It is roughly estimated in
euro at about 50 billion a year for the big
banks to give them a higher credit rating and so
on. The credit agencies take that into account
when they rate them that they are going to be
bailed out by tax payers if anything goes wrong.
All of that is just encouragement to continue a
cycle of risky transactions. Profits, bailouts Ė
itís been going since the early Reagan years. By
that time the regulatory apparatus of the New
Deal was being dismantled, so this was
encouraged.

Now, there
is legislation in the US the Dodd-Frank Bill
which is supposed to put some restrictions on
this. But it is quite unclear first of all how
much of the Dodd-Frank Bill will survive the
huge efforts of lobbyists right now to cut away
at it so that it not going to apply very well.
And even to the extent it does apply it leaves
many of the problems untouched. So, chances are
that we are building up to another and probably
bigger financial crisis. Meanwhile in Europe the
troika, you nowÖ

The
investment fund.

Yes. They
are carrying out policies which are almost bound
to be an economic disaster. Imposing austerity
during a time of recession just from a purely
economic point of view makes no sense. Say for
Greece, it just increases the debt. It cuts back
growth, so there is no way out of it. The
countries, Spain and Greece particularly, they
do not have control over their own currencies.
So, they canít do what the US or any country
that prints it own money could do. They canít
reduce the value of their currency and grow
their way out of it, they canít do that, they
are using the euro. So, they are trapped.
Austerity will make the situation worse.

In Greece
there is plenty of internal problems but it is
particularly striking in the case of Spain
because before the collapse of the financial
system which not the fault of the government,
thatís the fault of the Spanish banks, and
including the German banks which were doing the
lending, before this collapse in 2007 the
Spanish state budget was in quite a good shape.
And in fact, Spain has some of the lowest
expenditures in Europe for social services and
so on. So, it is not the matter of government
expenditures, it is a banking problem and it is
getting worse.

And even
the business press and the financial press are
criticizing this. In fact, the IMF has began the
back off from these policies because it is so
obvious where they lead economically. And it is
worth remembering that the ECB is much more
reactionary than its US counterpart, the Federal
Reserve. The Federal Reserve has a double
mandate. One mandate is to control inflation,
and there is not a hint of inflation inside. The
other mandate is to maintain the full
employment. Of course it doesnít do much about
that, but at least it makes some gestures. The
ECB has only the first mandate Ė to control
inflation. And it has to control it at an
artificially low level of 2% thatís imposed by
the Bundesbank which is very harmful to the
economies. And there is no mandate at all to do
something about employment.

So, its
policies have actually been worse than those of
the US Federal Reserve, its counterpart in the
US. And it is showing in Europe. One of the
consequences of it was actually described by the
President of the ECB Mario Draghi. Heís made an
interview to the Wall Street Journal in which he
said Ė the social contract in Europe is
unsustainable, it is dead, we have to give up on
a welfare state. From the point of view of elite
and wealthy sectosr, it is fine with them, they
never liked the welfare state. And if it is
dismantled it is too bad. And thatís where
Europe is going unless there is a big change.

As far
international relations are concerned, there is
quite a lot to say. US-China relations are
complex. Economically China is a growing power
and I think people underestimate the internal
problems it has to maintain it growth. And there
is a security conflict. In the US professional
literature it is called ďa classic security
dilemmaĒ. China wants to gain control over the
waters nearby China where most of its trade is.
And the US also wants to control the waters
nearby China. So, there is a conflict. And other
states in the region also have their own
conflicts with China about who controls the
isles of China Sea and so on. So, there is
plenty of problems and how theyíll be resolved
we donít know.

Japan-China territorial dispute

There is
the problem with the Japanese islands.

In the
West they are called Japanese islands but
Chinese call them Chinese islands. And in fact,
if you look at the history Japan doesnít have
much of a claim to them.

Do you
think thatís the part of the problem?

Thatís the
part of the problem.

Professor
Chomsky, thank you very much for your time and
the interview.

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